With the popularity of telecommunications services, the telephone has become an important tool for communicating with others in everyday life. However, telephone users often encounter a common problem, i.e., they cannot find the telephone number of the person they want to call in their own personal phone book.
Under this circumstance, one often will call someone who may have the telephone number of the person one wants to call, or use the “Yellow Page” service or directory assistance service provided by most telecommunications service providers so as to obtain the required telephone number. After obtaining the required information, the information has to be memorized or written down on a piece of paper before dialing the telephone number to contact the party one intends to call. Such a method may work under most circumstances. However, something may go wrong, i.e., one may have written down or dialed a wrong number.
A US patent document, US20040151296A1 discloses a “Method and system for automatically sending, receiving and utilizing information transmitted over a communication network” to overcome the aforesaid problem. The aforesaid patent publication employs a telephone having a dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF) receiver and a directory assistance center. When the directory assistance center delivers a phone number in DTMF format, the user's telephone can automatically capture the DTMF signal, and stores and displays the captured information to enable the user to press corresponding keys to dial the phone number or to allow the telephone to automatically dial the phone number.
However, in order to implement the method described in the aforesaid U.S. patent publication, the user's telephone has to be equipped with a DTMF transceiver. In addition, there is a critical problem. That is, if the public service, such as the Yellow Page service and the directory assistance service, is not able to provide the required contact information, or the required contact information is available only to a few specific subscribers in view of privacy concerns, the user is unable to obtain the required information.